My roommate is on a big Star Trek kick, re-watching the entire original series. I forgot how amazing and progressive and ahead-of-its-time it was. Actually, Star Trek: the Next Generation is also just as good. Hopefully Luke Butler will paint images from that series next or superimpose Captain Picard’s head on a nude body of Adonis.

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Joe Becker cites Baroque and Rococo painting as primary influences on his work, but the specters of more recent artists — Francis Bacon and Ivan Albright most prominently — also peer out from his grotesque images. Becker levels less-than-subtle indictments of man’s gluttony, violence, cruelty, and selfishness through his paintings, and while rarely using contemporary imagery, his commentary applies particularly to the current state of our civilization and the persistent human sense of entitlement. The wrath behind the snarling mouths and beneath the rot, decay, blood, and viscera of Becker’s pieces is almost tangible.

Acrylic paints are made of plastic, but Emily Noelle Lambert achieves a fluid, organic, timeless feel with her large-scale paintings. The New York-based artist draws from her own psychic narratives to guide her brush, resulting in repeated imagery and shapes that take on weight with each iteration.

Mark Powell makes amazingly horrific little dioramas that remind me of old Tool videos and certain scenes in Pan’s Labyrinth. The grotesque little creatures in Powell’s world are monstrous versions of ourselves, going about their business eating, defecating, dissecting things, and playing music with their slimy, vein-y appendages, reminding us viewers that we are all just piles of pulsating meat.

Korean artist Yoo Young-Wun makes fantastic sculptures of pop personalities and mythical figures out of scrap paper, old text books, flyers, and magazines, exaggerating and distorting their proportions and features in perhaps a comment on the way media relays information and turns real people into caricatures of themselves.

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I love animals, particularly goats (smart, independent, loads of personality, and a sustainable source of milk and meat), so Brad Woodfin’s animal portraits struck a chord with me. Painted in stark chiaroscuro or in front of heavenly clouds, the elephants, owls, deer, sheep, and many many goats in Woodfin’s pieces have a mysterious, brooding, transcendent quality about them.

A snippet from Lauren Gallaspy’s statement: ‘I want to make work through which desire, pathos, and obsession are encouraged, and the translation of event into imagination is made physical — form follows fetish’. Gallaspy’s work, in both the two and three dimensional formats, manages to unite opposition, an act which both exposes and captures the sublime.

We have a new series of prints in our online store from twelve year-old Australian artist Moofus which are printed on heavyweight archival matt paper with archival inks.

Athens, Georgia-based visual artist David Hale began his ascent in the public eye as a student, garnering attention with his stylistic, nature-inspired paintings. Over the past few years his diligence in the studio and streets, as well as time spent doing live painting for touring musicians has traced the development of a strong spiritual-symbolic language in his work. His recent entry into the tattooing medium has also been radically successful.

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Toronto-based painter Andre Ethier combines traditional painting techniques with flowing, textured brushwork to lend his psychedelic paintings a brooding moodiness that is reminiscent of the work of Ivan Albright as well as that of the Surrealists. Unlike other artists working with similar themes, Ethier’s images are more somber than they are giddily hallucinatory, and the horror he portrays is more nuanced, with vague references to ancient mythology and pop culture

New Delhi-based digital artist Archan Nair (aka archanN) has worked for notable clients, including CNBC, Hugo Boss, Apple and Tiger Beer. But although his corporate works stand out in their glorious, hyper-real colour, his more intricate and personal works are my favourites.

His brilliant rainbow-saturated pieces, The Peacock Dance, and Botanical Dimensions, decorate my office cubicle, taking me out of the day-to-day banality of work with the promise of fantasy lands beyond the earthly realm. The inspirations behind his work are the various phases of his life, and, at a young 26 years of age, it will be interesting to see how future life experiences will influence archanN in his creation of more amazing works.

Taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss, and Salvador Dali, Rose Skinner creates vibrant installation art from candy, plastic, and toys. Of her work, she says: ‘my intricate compositions of eclectic materials play tantalizing games on your senses; you are bombarded with colors and textures sounds and smells, metaphors and iconography that are used often in ironic ways’.

The beguiling crudeness of Daniel Jensen’s work adds to its expressiveness — like the work of a psychotically precocious child, Jensen’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures seem slapped together in a mad frenzy, yet manage to display a deft sense of movement, depth, and demented emotion.

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Using found/re-purposed paper to draw on, British artist Olivia Jeffries creates pieces that look as if they have fallen out of the notebook of some latter-day Da Vinci.

I love it! With the CD now being eclipsed by the MP3, I find myself feeling even more nostalgic for the simple charm of the cassette. Australian artists Andrew Smart and Jared Schmidt create ‘large scale hand-made wooden cassette tapes, routed, sanded, bogged, primed, and painted with a high quality paint finish’. Aha! The perfect way to memorialize my old mix tapes.

Sydney’s King Street Gallery is currently home to Macroscope, a collection of exquisitely crafted mixed media sculptures by Australian artist Shona Wilson. Her artworks are intricate weavings of found elements such as twigs, leaves, seeds, fish scales, insect body parts, feathers, crab claws, and seaweed.

These fragile mandalas draw inspiration from Diatoms, a microscopic sub-group of plankton. Recent research has revealed that these tiny organisms – major players in our food chain – show evidence of contamination by plastic. Hence, each of Wilson’s artworks hides within its patterns a tiny piece of beach-scavenged plastic. Wilson’s work urges all of us to consider how our species shapes the destiny of even the smallest life forms that share our planet.

Brooklyn-based collagist Mark Wagner does more with a single dollar than many people can with millions. His imagination, sense of humor and indignation, and eerily capable hands make money fun again, in an ironic way. Next under the knife, cigarette ads? (For it!)

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Some cool work from Robots Will Kill, an arts site dedicated to exposure for artists and media often disregarded by the mainstream art world. The core collective of artists that makes Robots Will Kill run also work on murals, canvases, clothing design and various other artistic outlets.

Presented only with stills from Italian artist Andreco’s stop-motion animation Fake Religion, I was really loving it, purely based on its stark, surreal imagery. I was pretty disappointed not being able to locate the actual video, but that aside, I simply adored the images. I really would have loved to have seen the video presented in the breathtaking setting of the Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna. Such a beautiful contrast of aesthetics between the dramatic murals and vaulted ceilings of the Palazzo and the stark graphic imagery of Andreco’s animation.

Australian illustrator Bindi Booth, who designed a series of Lost At E Minor postcards last year, has just sent a new Limited Edition Bindi Booth illustration book off to print. The books will be available for purchase from early November onwards.